Have you noticed that Heroku charges $100 per month to setup and run a custom SSL certificate? Well, if you're planning on running multiple SSL-enabled apps in the Heroku cloud, then you may be interested in a way to only be charged for one application, while securing them all; and Wojciech Kruszewski wrote up how to do it, using multi-domain certificates.

Zigzag Chen recently released a tool for Rails that automatically adds support for internationalization (i18n) in you ERB-based views. Running one command, ready_for_i18n will scan your views, insert translate calls and symbols, and populate a basic locale file for you. Then, you just need to copy/paste and update for each locale.

There are at least a half-dozen regional Ruby conferences coming up over the next several months that are all still open to new talk proposals. If you're interested in speaking at a local Ruby conference, you should use some free time this winter to write 'em up and send 'em out. They are:
LA Ruby Conf, February 20, 2010,
MountainWest RubyConf, March 11-12, 2010,
Ruby Conf India, March 20-21, 2010,
Scottish RubyConf, March 26-27, 2010,
RubyNation, April 9-10, 2010, and
RailsConf, June 7-10, 2010.

Last week we covered Ohm, an Ruby object mapper for Redis. This week we've found Mongoid by Durran Jordan, which is a Ruby object mapper for MongoDB. It provides an ActiveRecord-like syntax with finders, relationships, and validations, but fits snuggly over a schema-less MongoDB backend.

Rizwan Reza wrote up a nice article on the new routing DSL that will become available with the release of Rails 3. For complex routes, it creates a much more readable and straightforward syntax, using a simple block-style, hierarchical DSL.

Yehuda Katz wrote up another article on generic actions coming soon with Rails 3. These routes can be used to easily redirect specific endpoints to new locations, alleviating some of the need for mod_rewrite and the like. Or, you can use the new ability to render templates directly, skipping right over actions and controllers.